benlehman

I have been thinking a lot recently about Feudalism, by which I mean the system of government and a video game design that has been kicking around in my head for a long time. The essential concept behind Feudalism is to make a purely PvP (or, more accurately, clan vs clan) MMORPG, which would be dynamic enough to make such fights actually interesting, but would also support a sizable IG social structure based around the fundamental game mechanics.

That was a total mouthful of shit, wasn't it? Warning, wild game design geekery follows.
Would also note that yes, I know, no one would want to play it. But it is a cool idea, isn't it?

The basic idea is this: If you want to have a major social structure in your game, you are going to have to encourage people to kill shit together. If necessary, you can replace "kill shit" with any in-game activity. Feudalism would support this in two ways:
1) It would strongly favor numbers and tactics in combat, probably by giving strong priority to flanking and back attacks. Ideally, 5-6 intro level characters should be able to take on one of the bigger goons in the game and, even if they don't kill him, hurt him badly enough that he will feel it in the morning.
2) It would have very powerful non-combat support skill trees, most of which would require control of IG resources to operate. Thus, if you have enough people to own a small quarry, you can support a Mason, who can then build you walls which will allow you to kick defensive ass. If you have enough people to protect the iron mine, you can support a Smith, who can make you weapons and armor worth using. Etc.

This would be set up as a purely PvP game -- there would be absolutely no computer controlled mooks to kill. Thus, the main way of gaining combat experience is against other players. Because this makes the usual MMORPG racking structure totally pointless, you would need to be able to "practice" your skills to gain levels in them. You could add in various minigame structures which make practice something other than totally mindless, and that's probably going to be the main activity of the rank-and-file soldiers of the game.

In the beginning, I imagine that the game would be every-man-for-himself arena combat anarchy. But, because more people are better and there is no one to kill but other PCs, there would hopefully emerge clan based social structures. These would fight one another for resource control. It is most likely that, somewhere along the line, one clan would just get better than everyone else, and conquer the world. But, hopefully, the ambitions of the other PCs would be great enough that there would rapidly emerge things like banditry, revolutionary factions, and plots to assassinate the emperor. Hopefully, one of these would succeed, and throw the world into chaos again. Essentially, the plotline of the game is driven by the social instincts of human beings -- to form into groups around a strong personality, and to try to upset that personality.

I imagine that there would be two types of clans -- barbarian and civilized. Barbarian clans would be purely fighter-types, and leadership would be a contest of strength. They would gain resources from short, planned raids, as they really couldn't control territory. Civilized clans would have a large support infrastructure, and thus have walls, doctors, weapons, etc. But, there would be a lot of overhead, and strife between the civilian (production) and soldier populations.

The basic idea here is that little is hardwired into the system -- there are no "quests" to exploit, etc. In MMORPGs, such things are merely resources, that rival clans compete over for "who is bigger" competitions. Feudalism would take out the illusion of a storyline and allow the story of the world to develop naturally.

There are issues here. First and foremost, there is the issue of death. Because, if respawn were fast or penaltyless, there would be no way that an Empire would break up, and thus the game would rapidly get very boring. So, either, you need either a "penalty box" respawn that kicks you out of the game for, say, 24 hours or you need to penalize death. Either of these is disasterous, from a "selling the game" perspective. No one likes to die, or see their hard work go down the drain.

Here is what I would like to do: Make death permanent. It is totally unplausible from a commercial level, but damn, it would be awesome.
Here is another thought: Make death permanent, but allow a powerful player to start with a reasonably advanced PC.
Last thought (for now) on topic: Make death permanent. However, have the option to turn on "practice mode," in which most damage you deal goes away quickly and that loss results only in unconsciousness, rather than death. Thus, especially in the early game, a society could develop where wars are fought with practice swords, and no one needs to die. For instance, a barbarian raid might use this option in order to generate less ill-will from their victims. However, it would still be possible to kill the emperor, and remove him from the game permanently.

Anyway, that was my random creative thought for the day. Comments?